


kintsugi

by aliferlia



Category: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-21
Updated: 2013-06-21
Packaged: 2017-12-15 15:33:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/851161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliferlia/pseuds/aliferlia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fill for a prompt at the KuroFai Headcanon Meme at Dreamwidth: "Fai doesn't know how to feel about [Kurogane's scars], sees them as physical manifestations of the pain he has caused, and accidentally makes Kurogane feel like he needs to keep his own skin hidden from Fai."</p>
            </blockquote>





	kintsugi

**Author's Note:**

> my teeny tiny fill for Faren's awesome "scars" prompt~

**I**

In a world where the sun hung heart-red and heavy even at midday, and mosquitoes droned in great swathes over the grey marshes, they found themselves sprinting through the undergrowth: skidding down a rocky pathway and into a thick wall of gorse that lined the ravine. Arrows came whistling down around them, swift as swallows. Kurogane yanked Fai down into the bushes and hauled him through thorns to a narrow crevice at the base of the red cliffs, shoved him inside and went tumbling in after him a moment later. Pressed nose-to-nose into a tiny vine-clogged crack while the sounds of pursuit grew louder and louder outside, they waited, chests heaving and hearts drumming, half hard on adrenaline alone and giddy besides with the rush of being together and six feet from death.

Footsteps echoed over the noise of rushing water: someone yelled, ‘Hurry up! They went that way!’ Shaking helplessly with laughter, Fai gave a snort that Kurogane stifled with an absolutely obscene kiss. Coated in sweat and dust, they clung close amid the thorns and the heat and the stink of the rivermud, breathing rough against each other’s skin until silence fell.

‘Next time, don’t insult the prince’s singing,’ Kurogane muttered, reaching up to pull a browning spray of blossom from Fai’s muddy hair.

‘Completely unintentional, I assure you,’ Fai said, still giggling: then, sobering quite suddenly, caught hold of Kurogane’s chin. ‘Oh,’ he said, and yanked Kurogane’s face up almost roughly, angled it to catch the leaf-barred sunlight that flooded the cracks in the rock with gold. His mouth twisted up into a wry, unhappy grimace.

‘What?’ Kurogane asked: wriggled his arm out from a tangle of roots to feel at his face, found that it was bloody. ‘Must’ve gotten clipped by an arrow,’ he said, finding the edges of the gash. ‘Eh, it’s not that bad.’

‘It’ll scar,’ Fai warned him. With a sharp and bitter little sigh, he muttered,  ‘One more for the collection, I suppose.’

‘Had worse,’ Kurogane said, with a shrug and a bit of a grin, because he had. He put his hands to Fai’s waist, rocking up ever so slightly into his familiar weight.

But, ‘Yes,’ was all Fai said, and then he was wriggling away and out into the open.  ‘Come along, then - they’re gone. I do hope Syaoran-kun’s trial hasn’t started yet!’

‘Just once, can we go someplace that doesn’t try to throw us in jail?’ Kurogane complained, lumbering out into the thornbushes and kicking at a few for good measure: glancing up at Fai, who was already picking his way gracefully through the undergrowth, the sunlight blazing like gold in his hair.  ‘Hey! Wait for me, damn you!’

Fai turned back, beaming, his pink sunburnt cheeks streaked with mud, his eyes crinkling up at the corners: but his grin faltered, just slightly, as he looked at Kurogane. The next moment he had turned away again, singing, ‘Oh, but getting thrown in jail is half the fun, silly!’ in a hard, falsely bright voice Kurogane hadn’t heard in months. ‘Come along! We might be able to steal some more of that beer of theirs before they notice us.’

The mosquitoes droned on and on. From somewhere upstream there came a splash and a shriek as a fat-chested heron stabbed at a frog. Fai did not turn back. Kurogane spat into his palm and rubbed the blood from his face.

**ii**

Steam billowed up to dim the stars. Schools of fish, odd shimmering things in shades of blue and stealthy green, wove their way through the woodland air as though carried by a current: even the glimmering ferns that that clung to the roots and branches of every tree seemed to undulate slow and sinuous as though under a deep weight of water, and blind white crabs clung from every blade of grass. Kurogane sat at the edge of the warm broad pool and surreptitiously kicked waves at Mokona, who was paddling about in a small coracle and appeared to be having a marvellous time.

‘The guide-book says all the springs are completely natural,’ Syaoran was explaining from somewhere across the grove, his voice echoing loud over the water. He pushed aside a clutch of what appeared to be bioluminescent bamboo and fairly jumped with excitement. ‘Oh! Look, there’s another pool back here - oh, and there’s octopus in this one!’ His voice drifted away together with his footsteps.

‘He’ll be exploring for a while, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Fai said, fondly, shrugging off his thin cotton tunic and sitting down on the dewy grass next to Kurogane: smacked him lightly on the knee. ‘You stop trying to drown poor Mokona this instant.’

‘She asked me to,’ Kurogane protested, hurt.

‘Mokona is a fierce pirate captain!’ Mokona called cheerfully. ‘Not even the terrible kraken can sink her trusty ship! Avast!’

‘Oh, so you’re a terrible kraken, are you?’ Fai murmured to Kurogane, and leaned in to kiss his nose. ‘Very terrible.’

Kurogane pushed Fai in. The resultant splash sent Mokona’s coracle spinning across the pool: she whooped, ‘Surfs up!’ Fai surfaced, gasping in outrage, and grabbed for Kurogane, who was hastily shucking off his shirt in preparation for the inevitable plunge.

The water was warm as tea and smelt very sweetly of tannins, and shimmered moreover with the same bioluminescence that lit the plantlife all about: it had gotten into Fai’s hair, and clung to his lashes, so that when Kurogane gathered him up, spinning him round, it was to find that he shone. Yelling with laughter, Fai writhed and slapped at him, warm and heavy and whole in his arms. Kurogane kissed him. There had been a time when he had thought that none of this existed: there had been a time when he had truly believed peace too strange to be anything but fiction, happiness too tenuous to merit the blood that bought it. Fai kissed him back, or tried to, since he was grinning too hard to take it very seriously. Kurogane closed his eyes.

It was quite a sudden thing, and very small: a stone shifted under his foot, and he grunted, pulling Fai closer to keep his balance. In that same moment, long cold fingers found the thick patch of scarring at his left flank and fairly flinched back. Kurogane broke the kiss, lips parted, throat suddenly thick. Fai went stiff in his arms.

‘Kissy times,’ Mokona warbled, paddling past, ‘kissy times with mommy and daddy! How romantic!’

‘Your _face_ is romantic!’ Kurogane yelled, which, as insults went, was fairly feeble, and dove after her.

He shouted and he splashed, and when Syaoran came stumbling back into the grove, carrying a very small and very angry octopus swimming in a glass observation jar, he made a great show of examining the thing. He did not like silence, not when it came with Fai flinching away from him. He was not entirely sure what else he could do. The scars on his back prickled. He had never been angry at his own flesh before.

Fai, for his part, clambered out of the pool and sat watching them, very quietly. When Kurogane swam to the edge and made to heave himself out, Fai handed him his shirt. Kurogane took it without a word.

**iii**

It was a strange thing, still half-undiscovered, to be happy, and not one that came without considerable cost: they pushed every day against the thousand small hardships of a hundred wide worlds and won in exchange only a small respite.

There were days when Syaoran woke in tears, astonished and ashamed, and could say only, ‘I saw them -’ before shaking his head and scrubbing furiously at his eyes. There were unprovoked and awful days when Fai could not speak at all, and had to spend hours curled into himself at the foot of a bed, arms locked around his head, lips moving soundlessly as he counted himself back to safety. These things could not be undone, but in turn they could not undo the better days: the days when Syaoran bought a little wooden comb inlaid with pink mother-of-pearl flowers and stowed it away in his pack in eager anticipation of a reunion, the days when Fai looked out at a snowfield and sang strange lullabies to himself with half a soft smile on his lips. These things outweighed all else, at least in Kurogane’s eyes.

 - there were days, certainly, when the heavy mass of scar tissue at Kurogane’s shoulder pricked sharp as needles in the early cold: when the arm spat sparks and stuck still for a few heart-stopping minutes, when the weight of it tugged aching at his spine. He had chosen such smaller pains deliberate and full willing, and refused outright to regret it. He had thought that Fai had understood that. Angry more at himself than anything else, Kurogane kept his sleeves long and pinched out the candle before taking Fai into his arms at night. They pushed and pushed in silence against unhappiness. He believed more devoutly than he had ever believed anything else in his life that it was worth their while.

One night, as they slept on warm grass under the sight of the stars, Kurogane woke very suddenly and with dread to the touch of cold fingertips tracing the scars on his back. The motion was careful and deliberate and not at all tender, not at all fond. As a child, Kurogane had been instructed to sit with a stick and a tray of wet sand and trace the same ugly, meaningless shapes over and over again until they began to be reinforced by some degree of sense: so that he could pull from out the mess of harsh lines the shape for _moon_ , for _tree_ , for _woman_ , for _father_ , for _sky_. In this way, he had learned to write without wasting ink. He recognised that same rote drudgery in Fai’s fingertips, and wondered if Fai had taken it upon himself to build from his scars a bloody alphabet, to read from them in penance old miseries and past hurts. It was the sort of thing, he thought, with mounting frustration, that Fai would do.

He gave a long, exaggerated yawn, and Fai flinched away in the dark, held very still. Suddenly blazingly angry, Kurogane made a great show of rolling over in the grass and stretching: rubbed at his eyes, pulled the thin cotton sheets resolutely up to his chin. Fai sat beside him still as stone. It took Kurogane a very long while to fall asleep again, and in all that time, Fai did not lie down.

A scar, to Kurogane’s mind, was a scar: they meant mending, if anything, and stood for nothing more than fact. When he looked down at the long white lines at his wrists, the product of desperation and cold steel, he remembered only that he had survived, and Fai with him: but Fai put his palms to those same wrists in the pale light of dawn as though desperate to cover them, kissed Kurogane so miserably hard that they both of them tasted blood.

**IV**

The battle had been a good deal more vicious than anyone had anticipated, and although they had won, it was not without cost. Syaoran himself was unhurt, but the king of the little city, an old woman who had led them into battle, had lost a good deal of blood, and Fai had taken it upon himself to carry her back to her home, and to stay with her while her hurts were dressed. Bonfires had been lit in the shadow of the ruined village, the better to keep out the spirits of the dead, and were burning low in the chill before dawn. Pack open, bottle of Piffle Princess simskin heating at the fireside, Kurogane sat alone on a boulder beside the breathing coals, staring stubbornly out into the dark at the boundary-ring of witch-hazels, just in case anything else came through. There were no stars in this world: white moths moved silently over the grass.

Some secondary awareness he still couldn’t name stirred, and he turned to see Fai limping towards him, firelight flickering gold in his hair. He gave Kurogane a small smile: went soft to him where he sat and put his arms around his neck, pressed his lips to the top of Kurogane’s hair.

‘She’ll be alright,’ he said. ‘I think everyone will be. It wasn’t so bad after all.’

‘Told you,’ Kurogane said, careful to keep his arm pressed to his side. ‘Nothing we couldn’t handle.’ Carefully, he began to pull away, making to kick the bottle of simskin behind a boulder.

But Fai had already smelt the blood, and with one flinching motion had pushed the cloak away from Kurogane’s shoulder. His lips curled back when he saw the damage, and his fingers hovered as though afraid to touch. The claws had taken skin from the arm, so that the metal beneath flashed in the firelight and wrote gold all down Kurogane’s flesh, but the worst of it was the strain that had been done to the shoulder: several of the binding filaments had been wrenched loose from the mass of old scar tissue and were dripping an unpleasant mixture of blood and hydraulic fluid.

Kurogane jerked back, hot with shame and frustration, and dropped his eyes. ‘Look, if it bothers you, you don't have to -’

‘Of course it _bothers_ me,’ Fai said, his voice harsh and brittle, his mouth all twisted.

Kurogane stared up at him, aghast. ‘I don't want it to,’ he snapped.

‘Well, it does,’ Fai snapped back, and suddenly they were one wrong word short of the petulant sort of squabble that could last for days. For a moment they glared at each other, full of resentment and uncertain how to proceed: but then Fai took a deep breath, seeming to  rally himself, and continued, ‘But that's for me to deal with. I don't want you to feel like - I don't want you to hide from me.’

‘That’s not how you’ve been acting,’ Kurogane said, ashamed of his own shame and angry because of it: and then, ‘I notice, OK? Don’t think I don’t. And I think you’re making a big deal out of nothing, but if you’re not comfortable, then -’

‘Then I need to learn to handle it,’ Fai said, resolutely, and pressed his lips tight together.

It was not what he would have said a year ago. He was trying, Kurogane saw: trying to remember that he was worth a little blood. Kurogane supposed that if Fai could try to understand that, then he could understand that a world’s worth of innocent blood had been spilled on Fai’s account, once, and that that left scars of a very different kind. They worked at it. They filled what cracks in each other they could. It was worth their while.

‘Where’s the, ah, the -’ Fai said, turning away, ‘the -’

Kurogane watched him a long moment, his heart aching a little, before saying, ‘By the fire.’

And so Fai knelt and took the little crystal vial into his palm, shook it to check that it was properly melted: unscrewed the cap, which extended into a small applicator, and took Kurogane’s arm into his hand. Working very carefully, he dabbed generous helpings of the stuff onto each long rent in Kurogane’s false flesh and carefully smoothed them close. The liquid simskin glistened gold as it dried, so that for a little while, the wounds seemed almost beautiful in the dark.

‘A pity Tomoyo-chan hasn’t invented something like this for real skin yet,’ Fai said when he had done, offering Kurogane a bit of a smile as he carefully screwed the bottle closed and stowed it away in Kurogane’s pack. He touched the binding filaments at Kurogane shoulder and straightened them out as Tomoyo had taught him, watched determinedly as they burrowed their way back into the flesh.

‘Give her time,’ Kurogane muttered, wincing a bit, then reaching up to massage the bruised flesh. It would hold, he supposed, and he would make do. ‘That girl can invent anything.’

Fai busied himself with their packs, stripping off his own battle-torn cloak and folding it up neatly, finding a stick with which to stoke up the fire: came, after a time, to sit on the grass just beside the boulder. He leaned back, drawing his knees up to his chest, and put his head on Kurogane’s knee with a long sigh: said nothing, only closed his eyes. Kurogane let fall the weight of his steel hand, twined its fingers gently with Fai’s hair, carded through the mass of gold threads slow enough to match his heartbeat.

‘It happened,’ he said, quietly, when Fai’s head had already begun to nod in the early stages of sleep. ‘All of this, all of - these - they happened. And it’s not a good thing that they happened, 'cause they hurt like hell at the time. I won't lie about that, not to you. But it’s not a bad thing, either, ’cause you’re here. I look at the scars and I think, he’s still here. So then it’s not so bad.’

The fire cracked as the morning wind began to creep in through the witch-hazels. There was no other sound in all the world. Just as Kurogane was beginning to think that Fai really had fallen asleep, there came a murmur: ‘Do they still hurt?’

‘Sometimes,’ Kurogane admitted. He swallowed, remembering the first time he had held Fai’s head in his hands: said, ‘When it rains.’

Fai nodded in his lap. ‘I suppose,’ he whispered, yawning, ‘if Kuro-sama can survive all that, he can survive pretty much anything.’

‘Course I can,’ Kurogane scoffed, offended. ‘So you don’t need to worry.’

A bird sang, very suddenly, from the heart of the witch-hazels, and the wind kicked up the coals and sent sparks spiralling out into the dark. When next alone, a world away, Fai would put his fingers to the edges of each scar in turn as he kissed Kurogane into breathlessness. He would not seek to rewrite them, which would have done them a great disservice, only to illuminate them, filling up each rough hollow with the understanding of its value, and with the knowledge that not all broken things are unlovely.

That was still to come. Kurogane grumbled and rearranged himself in the grass, back to the boulder, and Fai and curled up into him, yawning loudly. They slept well into the dawn.


End file.
